good morning horsemouth! good morning paul!

 - good morning horsemouth! 

- good morning paul!

- haven't seen you in a while. where are we eh?

- we're in the countryside  at our parents.

- is that wise? I want to be with my friends. I want to run and play.

- well it is the middle of a global pandemic. the less contact with people you have the better. I mean, you've seen masque of the red death right? 

- yes but they have castles and drawbridges and things. you don't meet them in the queue at aldi. have at thee varlet serf, oh look red kidney beans at 30p a can. for prices this low it is worth risking death. 

- or maybe the thing/ alien...

- um...

- the best way to think about it I think is with zombie movies. it starts with just one zombie and then pretty soon it's the whole town shuffling about the place and discussing the price of brains, sniffing the air and peeking through your letterbox.

- ?

- less chance of that in the countryside, lower population density.  you've seen 28 weeks later.  that sort of thing.

- yes but I want to run and play. I'm sure I'm missing out on lots of parties and raves and super spreader events. 

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the problem for horsemouth and paul (as we can see from this transcript) is that they want to return to their previous lives of promiscuous sociability. in fact these are not the lives they lived. instead they have already lived lives of near monastic seclusion, a seclusion made possible by the city and its anonymity and indifference, by the new, eagerly embraced digital means of data harvesting and pseudo-connection.

the new means of data harvesting will serve them well wherever they are (you've seen the matrix). at some point horsemouth and paul have to sneak back into the city (well his life is there). 

they wonder what will be there. they suspect sten will have taken the opportunity to occupy their shelf in the fridge and to cover the front garden with rubbish, . apparently sten has been busying himself redecorating the living room (so they expect that to be an unuseable building site and should either of them  return they will be in any event confined to their own room).  

tonight a wolf moon. horsemouth and paul are going to make more effort to keep a track of the moon this year.